Skip to content
Multigrid

AI search visibility

How assistants find, fetch and cite pages — separating the mechanisms you can verify from the tactics that are only being sold.

Search stopped being one thing. A page can now be reached by a classical crawler that builds an index, by a training crawler that will never send a visitor, and by a fetcher acting on one person’s question in a chat window a second after they asked it. Those three want different things from your server and leave different traces in your logs.

Almost everything written about this subject is sold rather than checked. That is the gap these pages fill. Where a mechanism is written down in a specification or in an operator’s documentation, they explain it precisely and quote the syntax. Where you can observe it on your own server in one command, they give the command. And where a claim is about the inside of a ranking system nobody outside the lab can see, they say that plainly instead of dressing a guess as a technique.

The practical consequence is that this cluster asks you to measure rather than to believe. Most of the pages end in something you run.

How AI Assistants Choose Which Pages to Cite

The pipeline between a question and a citation list, stage by stage, marking which stages you can observe and which nobody outside the lab can.

9 min read

Generative Engine Optimisation: What Is Real and What Is Sold

A three-tier test for every claim in the GEO field, applied to the common tactics one by one, with the evidence each would need to be believed.

10 min read

llms.txt: The Proposal, the Adoption, the Honest Status

What the llms.txt format actually specifies, why publishing it is not the same as anything reading it, and the one-line log query that tells you which is happening to yours.

8 min read

robots.txt for AI Crawlers

The agent tokens, the exact directive syntax, the group-matching rule that silently breaks most AI robots.txt files, and why none of it is enforcement.

10 min read

Finding Out Which AI Bots Visit You

A log parser that identifies AI crawlers and verifies them properly — reverse DNS for the search engines that support it, published address ranges for the ones that do not.

11 min read

Structured Data That Machines Read

Which schema.org types are worth the effort, the rule that keeps structured data honest, and the reason JSON-LD is invisible to a plain text extractor.

10 min read

Writing Pages a Model Can Quote Accurately

Why a retrieved passage arrives without its page, and the sentence-level rewrites that make a paragraph survive being read alone.

9 min read

Zero-Click Answers and What Happened to Referral Traffic

Why the published figures on AI search and referral traffic disagree so violently, what is genuinely measurable from your own logs, and what is not measurable by anyone.

9 min read

Content Licensing Deals Between Publishers and AI Labs

The five structures these agreements take, which terms are disclosed and which never are, and how litigation and infrastructure changed the negotiating position.

9 min read

Paywalls, Crawlers and Selective Access

The documented way to let a crawler see paywalled content without cloaking, the access models publishers are testing, and where the line actually sits.

9 min read

Measuring Whether AI Assistants Mention You

A repeatable sampling protocol with the binomial arithmetic worked out, showing why a thirty-run study cannot detect the improvements this field advertises.

10 min read

When an AI Says Something False About Your Company

How to tell which of four mechanisms produced the false statement, and which corrections have any chance of working for each one.

10 min read

Retrieval-Friendly Site Architecture

How chunk boundaries, heading structure and the one-answer-per-URL rule decide whether your site can be retrieved as passages rather than pages.

9 min read

Sitemaps, IndexNow and Getting Crawled Sooner

A working IndexNow implementation with the status codes, the state file that stops it resubmitting everything, and a clear account of what it does not do.

10 min read

JavaScript Rendering and What Crawlers See

Fetch your page as a bot, diff the raw HTML against the rendered DOM, and close whatever gap you find — with the measurement script included.

10 min read

Programmatic Pages Without Becoming a Content Farm

The test that separates a useful template from scaled abuse, with both shown, plus a similarity script that tells you which side yours is on.

9 min read

E-E-A-T for Technical Content, Concretely

What E-E-A-T is and is not, and how to turn each of its four adjectives into a page element somebody could point at.

9 min read

What Makes a Page Worth Quoting

Four properties derived from how retrieval and citation actually work, each with a test you can apply to a page in under a minute.

8 min read

Answer Engine Optimisation: What Changed in the Results Page

The dated product changes that reshaped the results page, and a harness that measures how far down the first organic link now sits on your own queries.

9 min read

An Audit for a Site That Wants to Be Read by Machines

Twenty checks with a command and a pass condition each, covering access, delivery, structure and evidence — runnable in an afternoon.

12 min read

Other topics